6.09.2012

Silver Towers of Tzeentch, Part VI

First off, I must bow to marketing and plug my new
book. 14 just came out
this week from Permuted Press. You can
buy it in paperback, for your Kindle, your Nook, and in another week
Audible.com will have the audiobook version, read by Ray Porter who a bunch of
you might remember from a bit part in the LOST epilogue. This is how I pay the bills. so it's a great way to support In The Grim Cheapness and still come out ahead.

But now, to conclude with the Silver Towers.

I’ve got all the bulk stuff done. At this point I just wanted to add a few
little details here and there. The thing
is, I don’t want to overwhelm it with details.
There’s something very unnatural and appealing about the clean lines of
the original Epic model. Plus the fact
that none of the towers have doors or windows...

On the original model, each tower has one or two big cannon
barrels jutting out of their walls. Common courtesy (and rules) said I should
have something that counts as a “fire point” for the Towers’ random Bolts of
Change. I didn’t want something as crude
as a barrel, though. I toyed with the idea of simple gargoyles
made of card triangles and also with having mystical banners hanging off the
towers.

In the end, I decided on stacking disks from my different
hole punches. I did a 1/8’ on top of a
1/4” one. They don’t distract from the
sleek lines of the towers as much as gargoyles or banners would. I can also paint them blue to help tie them
to the Thousand Sons a little more.

Helpful Hint—If you wanted to drop another
buck or two and had a hobby store nearby, you could get a few small fake jewels
that would work, too. Figure out if
you’re going to want them as-is or if you plan on painting them so you can
decide when to attach them.

Remember way back when I drew the horizontal lines on the towers? This is why. Now I can add these fire-points across the tall
and short towers and keep them level. It
gives me a nice symmetry that helps to tie them together. I put them all around the model since the
Bolts are random and also “turret mounted,” effectively meaning they can fire
in any direction. I used the lower line
on the short towers, the higher one on the tall towers.

This left the Beam of Power.
It’s a single weapon, also turret mounted. I decided to do three more fire points for
the main tower and put them higher up (on the highest horizontal line). It makes them stand out, and my gaming group
is relaxed enough for them to count as one weapon. I also traced three small 1/2” circles and
cut those out, so these points are three discs deep. They went on the highest of my horizontal
lines, which also added to the sense of “the big gun.”

I added a bit of sand (plain old sand from the alley—not modeling
sand or textured earth or anything like that) around the base of the
towers. It’s a hair more support. I left it tight around the bases because I
really want a lot of the top to be grass.
Some of the sand got a little too high and I scraped it back down. These are mystical towers, after all. I added a bit on the underside of the plauteau
as well, to break up the textures there.

I decorated the base with some sand, some pieces of broken
cork, and a few big rocks, too. That will help hide the ridge of the plate. I briefly toyed with the idea of a big
Tzzentch symbol “burned” into the ground, or maybe a chaos star, but it didn’t
really work with the odea of a moving tower.

I spray painted the whole thing black to start. Base, cylinder, and towers. The towers took two coats, because I wanted
to make sure the rocks on the bottom were all done, as well as all the spaces
between the towers.

Helpful Hint—I decided to leave these three separate
pieces unglued. It makes for much easier
transportation, and for touch-ups if it ever needs them.

To do the silver, I used spray-paint again. First, thought, I wrapped the entire
plateau-section in paper (another use for junk mail) to mask it. I did two coats to make sure they got covered
from every angle.

Another Helpful Hint—Never do heavy coats of paint with
Paperhammer models. Getting them wet is
one of the worst things you can do. Take
your time and do light coats.

I haven’t finished painting (this is an early-on photo), but when I do I’ll add a
picture to the bottom. Here’s how it’s
going, though...

The plateau is just lots of Camo Green and eventually some
grass. The bottom and sides of the
plateau got a few drybrushes with Space Wolves Gray and Fortress Gray. Yes, I’m still using the old names. Sue me, I’ve got paint to use up. I touched a few places with different browns
to give the appearance of loose soil clinging to the granite. I did the same on the base of the stand.

The vents on each tower are done in black. Nice and simple. From a distance, it even makes them look a
bit like they’re cut into the surface, not sitting on top of it.

I painted the fire points as gems, using the gem technique
from the old Codex: Eldar. On the larger
ones for the Beam of Power, I made the outer ring gold to help it stand out
and look a little more impressive. The gold also gave it another link to the
Thousand Sons.

And there you have it (or them). The Silver Towers of Tzeentch. In retrospect, I might’ve made the island a
tiny bit smaller—maybe just an inch or two across—but overall I’m pretty happy
with how this came out. It’s a bit
bigger than a Monolith, a bit smaller than a Warhound, so that puts it in
a good size range for 400 points.

Helpful Hint--If you’re into Warhammer Fantasy
as well as 40K, you could probably do also this all at one-third the size and
make a nice Arcane Fulcrum of some sort.
Just get a square tray or plate for the base and leave off one or two
towers so you’ve got room to place a figure or two. This is a very easy model to scale down.

Final cost for this Grim Cheapness project was probably
around eight bucks. A dollar each for
the plate, wine glass, pens, and glue.
Call it four dollars for the spray paint (even though I already owned
both colors). Even if I’d had to buy the
foam core for the plateau, I think it only would’ve been two or three dollars
more. So we’re talking ten bucks and
maybe twenty hours of work (if you count drying time) for a 400 point model.

Next time I’ve got some more simple, cheap Dark Eldar
conversions to show off. After that are a
few Necron and Ork ones. And I might try
to cash in on the popularity of this whole Summer of Fliers thing with a new Paperhammer
project. Hopefully before summer’s over.

Oh, and a few posts down I added an in-progress painting
shot of Gigan.

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...There Is Only War!!!

I'm a long-time Warhammer 40,000 fan who thinks there's a viable middle ground between the folks who insist on dropping a few hundred dollars to get a usable army and the people who show up with a rubber dinosaur to represent a Carnifex or some green army men bulking out their Imperial Guard platoon.

Don't get me wrong. I love Games Workshop's models and I hate seeing a milk carton standing in for a Land Raider. When a financial crunch forced me to become a lot more thrifty with my toy soldiers, though, I didn't stop playing. I just found ways to customize and create perfectly usable units with the resources I had at hand. And I've done it enough that I think it's worth sharing with anyone who's interested.

So save a few frozen pizza boxes, grab some white glue, and let's build an Imperial Knight that any loyal servant of the Emperor would be honored to have fighting alongside them.

Departmento Munitorum

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